


(and I think to myself) what a walderful world

by orphan_account



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Crack, M/M, Post - Red Wedding, circa-ADWD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-12
Packaged: 2018-03-11 10:57:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3324959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Red Wedding takes a surprising turn, and an unexpected love blooms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Every morning Walder woke up and cursed his lucky stars when he saw the face across the bed. He felt wrong, Robb Stark was a king in name but a boy in truth, but the sight of him sleeping impassively managed to shake loose a few bits of ice from Walder’s bitter old heart. That morning had been more active than most, however. Walder slid his pale wrinkled hand down Robb’s lithe young back. It glowed in the candlelight dawn light. My wolf, though Walder.

Robb truly had been a wolf that morning, tearing the sheets from Walder with a ferocity rarely seen outside the wild. Walders thighs hurt from the wanton way he had let the lad take him, but it was a good, satisfying ache. Robb smiled up from the pillow, cheeks flushed.

“Waldy?” Robb inquired softly, barely above a whisper.

“What is it my sweet King?”

“You know I don’t blame you for it. I broke my word, and you were hurt. I should never have.” Robb’s voice was even quieter now, if that was possible. “I should never have been so hasty with your emotions.” His eyes bored holes into the bedsheets as he spoke, and the blush of his cheeks turned from coral to crimson. The Red Wedding was a delicate subject between them. Any time conversation turned to Lady Catelyn or Robb’s bannermen they ended sitting in an uncomfortable silence, neither wanting to talk. Walder had spared Robb on a moment’s whim. He’d slaughtered his mother, sure enough, but waved away the blow that would have ended the King in the North for good. There was something in the way that their eyes had locked, Walder on the dias, and Robb on the blood soaked floor. Walder had felt a spark in his loins none of his wives had ever managed to stir.

Walder had nursed Robb’s wounds himself, turned away the maester except when he brought fresh bandages. He knew the story of Robb’s wife Jeyne, how she had cared for him in this same manner. And in the same manner, the young wolf had stolen his heart. He took to sleeping in Robb’s room, beside his sickbed. In the hall he could hear Hosteen and Aenys fighting over what to do with him, but he stayed loyally by Robb’s side. When Robb finally opened his eyes, he spotted Walder, and smiled.

Now tears welled in Walder’s eyes as he felt the sincerity of Robb’s words. He took Robb in his arms in a burst of strength that surprised them both, flinging off the furs. He wished to love his young adonis in the light of the pale morning sun, unashamed and free.


	2. afreyd of the future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Robb and Walder ride to reclaim the North together, doubts form.

The cold northern air felt right in Robb's lungs. "Home," Robb thought, and felt his heart lift a little. The march had been long and hard, and morale was falling. He sent a glance over to Walder. His lover seemed haggard from the long travel, but there was a brightness in his rheumy eyes that had not been there before.

“Has it been long since you’ve seen the North, my love?”

“Not since I was a boy, many summers ago. It was prettier then, I’d say. None of this buggering snow.” Walder waved a hand ineffectually at the lazy flakes sticking to his cloak and thick quilted doublet. A few frozen droplets clung to his wispy eyelashes. The sight made Robb want to lean in and taste them.

There would be time enough for that later, however. Now, as they looked out on the endless moors between themselves and Winterfell, strategy had to take form. With the Boltons holding on the Robb’s ancestral home, any attempt to rally the Northmen again seemed doomed. Robb’s strategy, in its entirely, was Walder. Beautiful, impossible Walder, filled with contradictions and idiosyncrasies, he was Robb’s key to the North. If anyone could barter with a man like Roose Bolton, it was a man with a Frey tongue. They had no terms drawn up, it was true, for any time an advisor approached Robb with parchment and quill Walder had the ability to do one small thing that had Robb dragging him back to the bedchamber. True as well that they had no army. All surviving northmen had fled following the bloodbath at the Twins. The men who marched behind the quartered Stark and Frey banned were all Frey men. Robb paid no mind however. With Walder at his side, who could stop them?

That night they camped on a soft rolling hill near a brook. The king’s tent stood tall in the center, warm light radiating from the endless candles Robb knew Walder enjoyed. As he waved away the guard and pulled back the flap, Walder greeted him with a shy smile. The older man was perched on the bed, leg pulled up for balance but showing a tempting flash of thigh. Robb’s heart skipped a beat. “Have you been waiting long?”, he asked, a quavering fighting its way into his words.

“Any wait for my wolf to return is a long wait.” Walder replied. When he spoke like that, Robb could feel the blood rise under his skin. He had laid with Jeyne several times before they were separated, but she was never as open in her advances as Walder was. Some might consider Walder’s age a disadvantage, but Robb disagreed. Walder had experience. Walder’s hands could find places that no woman of Robb’s generation could. Every night with Walder was a lesson in the dying art of pleasure.

Robb fell into Walder’s embrace again and again that night. Perhaps stamina ran in the Frey family line, for once one round was over, all it took was a graze of Robb’s hand over a supple, wrinkled thigh for the next round to begin. The guards must have gone crimson from the filth that poured from the mouths of both men inside the tent. At one point, Robb even dared to growl, as he knew Walder enjoyed it.

The next morning they awoke sticky and sore. As Walder cracked each vertebrae in line, Robb let the crisp autumn air invigorate his spirit for the daily march. They hoped to make it to a place at least on a latitude with Barrowton by sundown. Robb approached Walder from behind, dressed as the gods had created him, and helped his lover work out the last few cricks in his aging spine.

“Walder, do you really believe this will work?” Robb peppered the anxious works between kisses to Walder’s shoulders. He felt the muscles beneath his lips tense at the question. However, the answer was confident and unhurried.

“I have the deepest faith in you, my wild King.”


	3. .........for love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robb and Walder reach Winterfell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I plan for this to have two more chapters. Hope you enjoy some more of our beautiful rarepair.

Robb’s nerves grew as they approached Winterfell. No doubt the Bolton host inside the walls had gotten word of their approach, and were preparing for Robb’s arrival. Robb hoped for a treaty, or words, not a battle. He had seen enough blood to last a lifetime. Not a thought befitting a king, surely, but the truth nonetheless.

As they marched, the party picked up peasants still loyal to the Starks, willing to bet their lives on who they believed to be the last remaining wolf. However, the battered lands of the North provided little and less to build siege engines with, and thus Robb’s army was little more than a ragtag group of Stark loyalists with hoes and axes. The great roundtower of Winterfell grew on the horizon.

The morning of the day in which they would reach the walls of Winterfell it snowed. The morning chill pushed Robb deeper into Walder’s arms while they slept. When Robb awoke, he was almost completely enveloped in his lover’s arms. He gave one silken wrinkled wrist a stroke in the hopes the sensation would wake Walder. When it didn’t, Robb rolled over and planted a small peck on Walder’s dozing mouth. The lips under his turned from lax into a slow smile, before a tongue was pushing into his mouth, warm and lazy. 

“It’s the day” Robb mumbled when they broke apart. Walder stroked one hand through Robb’s curls, and used the other to hike the furs up closer around them.

“No cause for fear, my love. I am wisened in the ways of war and peace, and we both know the castle will be ours before sundown.”

Robb knew that the castle was poorly manned, the troops sectional and disloyal, morale low and death imminent on all the soldiers who could not find a warm room in Winterfell to sleep in. He believed in Walder’s experience yet doubted his own, perseverated on every mistake which had led to the death of his mother, wolf, and bannermen. The Boltons were a brutal folk. Could he be leading himself and the man he loved into another slaughter? The thought chilled him to the bone.

The chill had not left by the time the walls of Winterfell loomed over Robb’s head. The sight nearly took his breath away. The rush of memories, of joy and love and loss he had in this place was dizzying. He dared a glance at Walder. His face was resolute, strong, a true soldier even in his old age. A voice called from atop the battlements.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t finish the jobs the Freys started.” A crossbowman leaned out in Robb’s direction.

Robb squeezed the reins of his horse. “Because I come in the name of love.”

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to thank everyone in [theon hell](http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/theon-hell) for sparking this idea. Why no love for Walder Frey? This fandom can get it up for anyone why not Walder come on.


End file.
